Harlots is a reclamation, but not in the simplistic sense of making Shakespeare’s women louder or stronger. Emma Wright shifts the centre of gravity of the canon itself, asking what happens when women who have so often existed in relation to men are allowed to become the subjects of their own stories.
Wright’s choices become richer the more familiar you are with the original plays. Paulina’s presence carries the weight of everything she already represents in The Winter’s Tale, while Perdita remains part of the emotional architecture surrounding Hermione even when she is not physically present. Across Hero, Ophelia, Helena and Beatrice, Harlots keeps finding the pressure points Shakespeare left behind – the brilliance of Harlots is not that it rewrites these women, but that it finally lets us see them.
The entire ensemble is exceptional. Megan O’Connell, Hannah Waterman, Madeline Li, Ella Prince, ‘Ana Ika and Jo Downing make these women funny, difficult, wounded, powerful, furious and completely individual. Madeline Li’s Hero is particularly extraordinary, finding enormous power in vulnerability and womanliness without ever needing to harden the character into some conventional idea of strength.
Kate Beere’s set may be the best use of the Old Fitz I’ve seen: an underground theatre beneath a pub transformed into an underground refuge that genuinely feels inhabited. Luna Yuet Yee Ng’s lighting then makes that world unstable in the best possible way, moving between reality, dream and apparition until the boundaries between memory, imagination and the physical refuge begin to dissolve.
What Harlots ultimately understands is that challenging a classic does not diminish it. Sometimes the most meaningful way to engage with the canon is to ask whose humanity we have historically treated as universal – and whose was always there, waiting for us to look.